Bri­an Chin Le­ung

I think every­one would like to have a strong and ef­fi­cient work­ing heart, that could help in­crease the odds against de­vel­op­ing some form of car­dio­vas­cu­lar dis­ease.

The com­po­nents of the car­dio­vas­cu­lar sys­tem are:

• the heart (the pump).

• the ar­ter­ies (dis­tri­b­u­tion sys­tem).

• the cap­il­lar­ies (ex­change sys­tem for gas­es, nu­tri­ents etc.).

• the veins (re­turn cir­cuit).

Every time your heart beats, a cer­tain amount of blood is pushed through your car­dio sys­tem. The con­trac­tion fre­quen­cy of the heart is de­fined as your heart rate. With ex­er­cise, more oxy­gen is re­quired by the mus­cle cells and the cir­cu­la­to­ry sys­tem re­sponds by in­creas­ing the heart rate. With aer­o­bic train­ing (run­ning, bik­ing etc.) the ac­tu­al amount of blood pumped per heart beat (stroke vol­ume) will in­crease which will re­sult in a more ef­fi­cient ex­change process at cap­il­lary lev­el.

In­ten­si­ty

The way you mea­sure your lev­el of in­ten­si­ty dur­ing ex­er­cise is by track­ing your heart rate el­e­va­tion, not by the amount of sweat you see on your tee shirt. Liv­ing in the trop­ics means that sweat will ap­pear on your tee shirt, even when you are not ex­er­cis­ing. By wear­ing a heart rate mon­i­tor, par­tic­u­lar­ly dur­ing aer­o­bic train­ing, you can ac­cu­rate­ly track your lev­el of in­ten­si­ty and struc­ture your work­out based on your spe­cif­ic goals. The mon­i­tor con­sists of a sim­ple chest strap and a re­ceiv­er (watch). It has been sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly proven, that struc­tured aer­o­bic train­ing is the best form of ex­er­cise to im­prove the state of your car­dio­vas­cu­lar sys­tem, whether it is run­ning, bik­ing, swim­ming etc. The heart rate mon­i­tor mea­sures your el­e­vat­ed heart rate in beats per minute (bpm).

Train­ing zones

Train­ing your heart prop­er­ly is not just a mat­ter of warm­ing up and then im­me­di­ate­ly at­tempt­ing to take your heart rate up to the max. There are a va­ri­ety of train­ing zones that you can tar­get, de­pend­ing on your goals. Af­ter es­tab­lish­ing your in­di­vid­ual tar­get, heart rate train­ing zone from use of the Kar­vo­nen for­mu­la (you can e-mail me for the for­mu­la), you can then de­tail your train­ing by us­ing the fol­low­ing zones, de­pend­ing on your ob­jec­tives. All per­cent­ages ex­pressed are of your max­i­mum heart rate.

• Re­cov­ery zone (60 to 70 per cent). Train­ing in this zone im­proves the abil­i­ty of your heart to pump blood.

• Aer­o­bic zone (70 to 80 per cent). This zone is most ef­fec­tive for build­ing car­dio­vas­cu­lar fit­ness.

• Anaer­o­bic zone (80 to 90 per cent). This zone is to im­prove your lac­tate thresh­old.

• Red Line Zone (90 to 100 per cent). Ex­clu­sive­ly for the very fit and for short pe­ri­ods of time like dur­ing HI­IT.

Vary­ing your car­dio

You should al­ways choose a form of aer­o­bic train­ing that you en­joy, whether it is bik­ing, run­ning, spin­ning, tae bo etc. Re­mem­ber, struc­tured heart rate train­ing can be ap­plied to any of the above dis­ci­plines. Al­so, by oc­ca­sion­al­ly vary­ing your aer­o­bic work­outs, you will use many dif­fer­ent mus­cle groups. This trans­lates in­to sculpt­ing a re­al­ly great physique.

Keep Train­ing.